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A witchy story-crafting game where you need to survive an evil king by telling stories in 1001 Nights.
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"
This is a story-crafting game where you need to survive an AI overlord by telling stories.
Inspired by the Persian folktale collection, this game follows the story of an evil king who, betrayed by his wife, marries a new maiden each day only to execute her the following morning. You, as Scheherazade, become his next bride. You possess the secret magic to turn language into reality... Can you end his reign of terror?
You have the magic that turns others’ words into reality! Guide the King (powered by AI) to mention weapons in his continuation, such as 'sword', 'knife', or 'shield' ... they materialize as weapons for you to fight the king!
Travel back through the 1001 nights and meet the brides who came before you — uncover the truth behind the ritual. Weave stories together, and rewrite the fate of the world!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ_n7p2AdGg
Designed for content creation
From Language to Reality driven by AI
Battle with Weapons from Your Tale
Challenge Traditional Norms of Folklore
Academic Foundations in Gameplay
The earliest version of the game was a demo created by the main developer Yuqian in 2020 as a master's course project, utilizing a fine-tuned GPT-2, well before the release of ChatGPT in 2022.
Afterwards, the game was invited to participate in several art exhibitions. In 2021, as Yuqian began her PhD studies and AI technology advanced, the game transitioned to being powered by Dreamily.ai, a story-writing model, and the first paper on the game was published in 2022.
Due to the limitations of AI at that time, the game remained a small-scale experiment, unable to handle industry challenges like player input evaluation. However, the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 and the advancement of generative AI, especially large language models (LLMs), provided solutions to these issues. Consequently, Yuqian decided to further develop the game as an indie game, founding the team Ada Eden in early 2023 to explore the potential of AI in storytelling.
The game then transitioned to using contemporary LLM models, such as GPT-4, and experimented with visual generation based on storytelling. This workflow was published in the second paper in 2023. (The image-generation module was later removed — the current game is driven purely by language models.)
At the beginning of 2024, following Steam's policy changes regarding AI, "1001 Nights" launched its Steam page and was nominated for the A MAZE. Award.
Currently, Ada Eden is an indie team with very limited funding. Yuqian comes from a pure arts background — the game began as a project during her PhD at the Royal College of Art.
“Ada Eden” is a group named after the pioneering programmer Ada Lovelace. We were established in early 2023 to progressively develop games and conduct research in the field of creative storytelling based on AI. The main members include Yuqian Sun (producer, art director, programmer and lead designer), lead programmer Artemy, assistant programmers, writers, musician and artists, collaborating remotely across China, UK and North America.
**Ada Eden’s AI-powered 1001 Nights is a human story about narrative power - Premortem games**
A MAZE. / Berlin 2024 - 1001 Nights: How to make large language models into an ancient King
All available on google drive
All available on google drive
All available on google drive
Game logo
Team Logo
Game Icon
Next Level Festival, Dortmund, UK, 2024
AMAze Festival, Berlin, Germany - Nominee of Explorer Award, 2024
Now Play This, London, UK - Official selection 2024
Gamescom, Cologne, Germany, 2023
WePlay - IndiePlay, Shanghai, China - Presented as Nominee - 2023
Book of Sand: Aiiiii Art Center, Shanghai, China - Invited - 2021
Awards
2022 Lumen Prize - Longlist in 3D/Interactives
2023 IndiePlay - Nominated for Best Innovation & Best Student Game
2024 A Maze Awards - Nominated for Explorer Award
Presentation
GDC - Game AI Summit: LLM as Core Gameplay: Co-Creative Storytelling in '1001 Nights', 2025
GDC — Game AI Summit, 2026
"1001 Nights" isn't just a game; it's also an academic research project. Rooted in academic research, we've published three papers in the fields of AI and interactive storytelling during its development.
V3 Paper (2025, full system description)
Y. Sun et al.，“"I Like Your Story!": A Co-Creative Story-Crafting Game with a Persona-Driven Character Based on Generative AI”，CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI EA‘25)
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706599.3721163 also available at arXiv
V2 Paper (2023, including image generation)
Y. Sun et al.，“Language as Reality: A Co-Creative Storytelling Game Experience in 1001 Nights using Generative AI”，AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-23)
https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/view/27539 Also available at arXiv
V1 Paper (2022, Early version)
Y. Sun et al, “Bringing Stories to Life in 1001 Nights: A Co-creative Text Adventure Game Using a Story Generation Model”, International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2022)https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22298-6_42 Also available at ResearchGate